I’ve seen threads posted where it’s talking about something and then electric vs ICE comes up and derails it. So, for everyone who likes arguing about this topic, this thread can be used for just that. Enjoy.
i like both. i feel as though electric cars can be cool, especially custom ones (look at the Icon mercury coupe, the teslonda, Rich rebuilds' rat rod) I understand why a lot of people don't like them, but I think everyone (bar maybe shotgun chuck) will come to at least accept them at some point, especially when we start seeing more modifying coming into them, likely when teslas hit the bottom of their depreciation curve.
EV lovers always say that EV require less maintenance, however, an ICE vehicle lasts way longer than its EV counterpart.
Pretty much this. I also would find it very odd and annoying to not hear an engine responding to pressing the throttle.
I do know for a fact that within the next 50 years all personal ICE car's will be gone from the production chain and replaced with EV's whether or not people like it. I don't believe that Diesel trucks- lorry's- semi trucks will go away anytime soon. Diesel is the most efficient ICE fuel type and can go farther with less logistical problems that EV's have. Until a even more efficient battery than the best lithium ion battery is discovered ICE will always have the range advantage along with the fact you need to change out the battery's on a EV every 5-8 years or so.
Modern EV batteries already have wear patterns allowing half million mile lifespans. The only models needing new batteries you'll see all have tiny capacity cells in first place which hammers them on wear during normal usage. Tesla are so utterly convinced in their battery longetivity they're still honouring warranty replacement on the roadster. Though that is indeed not enough for a truck.
I could argue til i'm blue in the face that ICE is better than EV but it all boils down to: Cost Lack of sound No 'tinkering' or 'bodging' Battery performance in cold temperatures Can't turbo/supercharge No exhaust mods But EV can offer: Instant torque Better weight distribution Probably other stuff Because after all, the RC community switched from ICE to EV and RC cars are still fun and modifiable.
That claim seems unfounded or at least very simplified. Beyond the battery - which I will talk about below - there is simple no reason of why an electric drivetrain - which is the primary difference between an ICE and an electric car - should last not at least as long as an ICE one. There are in fact several technical reasons why it should and most likely will last much longer: Lower overall complexity. An ICE consists a a very large amount of moving parts. Failure of any such parts quickly leads to catastrophic engine damage. Meanwhile an electric engine is little more than a shaft inside a bunch of magnets. Due to primary operating principle, an ICE has to deal with - Fuel - which is a poor lubricant at the best of days, yet comes into contact with moving parts (intake valves, entire engine due to blow by causing oil poisoning) - Exhaust gases that not only are very hot but also highly corrosive. Very significant material investments are necessary for any kind of longevity which makes exhaust system one of the most expensive "simple metal pipes" on the planet. - Generally requires water cooling for most fuel economic or performance applications. Not only does this add to the overal complexity and costs it also adds more points of catastrophic failure. Head gasket damage or coolant loss can quickly turn into catastrophic engine damage. - Lack of efficiency in turning fuel into movement (BEST case scenario (almost never happens under real driving conditions) gives gasoline engines 35 % and diesels up to 45 %. Let that sink in for a moment... your super efficient diesel still turns more than half of its entire fuel tank into nothing more than useless heat and lots of toxic exhaust fumes) means a lot of waste heat has to be moved away from the engine. A gasoline engine producing 100 KW of power has to deal with arround 200 KW of waste heat. All this heat causes further issues: - Pistons are difficult to cool and as such become very hot under sustained driving. This forces engine producers to set tolarances for peak temperature. In english, to avoid the piston sticking to the cylinder wall the tolerances are set up for peak temperature. This however means that when the engine is cold - as it is very morning and evening - your combustion chamber is less than optimally sealed. You have blow by which causes higher fuel consumption, wear and tear as well as oil poisoning. There is a reason why 100000 km of city driving are considered worse than 100000 km of highway driving (assuming you dont abuse it as a racetrack) - Conditions inside an ICE can be perfectly described as pure hell. Toxic corrosive stuff everyhwere.... thundering detonations and vibrations, fire and a searing heat. - Engine oil has to withstand those conditions, making it expensive and requiring regular replacement. - Kinematics of a piston engine are inherently less balanced and refined: Pistons moving up and down means that the pistons comes to a full stop two times per engine rotation. The protective oil film on the cylinder wall collapses everytime this happens. The need to transform up and down movement into rotation energy also causes an rod imbalance. You see... the more the pistons nears bottom dead end the more of its connection rods movement happens in the horizontal plane. At the same time, the upward moving pistons has most of its connection rod movement happening in the vertical plane. The force of the two upward moving pistons as such is a 90 degree vertical upwards one. The force of the two downward moving pistons is a 90 degree vertical downwards one minus the vertical force exterted by the more horizontal moving rod. As such, 4 cylinder engines are only balanced on the first order. Because while 2 pistons move up and 2 move down all the time, they dont do it at the same vertical speed and vertical force at the same time. Vibration and not compensated forces like that - as well as the general enormous stress level of connecting rods - limit RPM to (compared to electric motors) mundane 6000 - 7000 RPM for most average car engines. While higher RPMS are possible, those require very expensive materials and also usually need a shorter stroke length as pistons speeds of above arround 25 meters per second cannot be exceeded. While muss development has went into fine tuning and refining ICEs, rising mechanical complexity and costs simple make it unviable past a certain point for anything but the most expensive luxury cars. Meanwhile electric motors are simple shafts that have little issue reaching and maintaining 20000 RPM without any vibration at all. The turbo charger in ICE cars is a very similar construction except being powered by exhaust and not magnetism and it is capable of in excess of 100000 RPM. Why do you think tram and train electric motors last millions of kilometers? Lack of mechanical complexity and comparable low operating vibrations. I could say so much more.... but one could write entire essays about this topic. TLDR: ICEs have a lot of issues and are actually quite a poor choice for car mobility because driving is primarly about changing loads on mostly short to midrange travel. Electric motors characteristics are actually much better suited for everyday driving as they have a fraction of the issues of ICEs. We only ever used ICE in cars, because there was nothing better available. Just like we used steam engines until we found something more efficient. Electric motors have always been superior.... they have always been hold back by the lack of battery technology. Since this is increasingly a fixed issue.... I dont think you will find many new ICE cars on sale in as little as 10 years. Probably wont see any at all in 20. Costs is indeed an issue but it is becoming less important as battery prices have fallen drastically while capacity and lifespan have increased. In 10 years.... I would estimate batteries price and capacity to be at least 2 times more efficient than today with the resulting ranges and prices. Lack of sound is at the end of the day more of an advantage, especially once the issue of pedestrian security has been properly adressed. In fact, one of the reasons why so many people are in love with EV once they have driven one is the quitness and lack of vibration. No tinkering? I dont think so.... electric motors can be overloaded for increased power output and have a wide range of parameters that can be changed, if one does desire so. Battery performance in cold temperatures is a primarly capacity related issue. High capacity batteries can maintain competive ranges even in winter and can afford to "waste" energy on battery heating and passanger comfort. Regarding super/turbocharging.... see above regarding overload. Beyond that... one has to understand that both super and turbochargers are at the end of the day a crutch to overcome a principial drawback of running piston engines. Charge is only arround 60 % of the actual engine volume for engines without turbo/supercharger. If you car has 2.000 displacement it will only use 2.000:100*60 = 1.200 L of air per full cycle on average. Long intake routes, lightning fast valve operation and fraction of seconds time only dont allow for much more without using some sort of charged air. Your engine literally breaths through a thin drinking straw. No exhaust mods? Yes.... absolutly. But no exhaust in inner city either.... and to be honest... considering what most people do with exhaust mods.... I am not sure that I am going to miss it.
This. I love how most people treat Tesla as a transcending god as if they revolutionized the car industry with electric cars even though it has a lot more history than what people first think of electric cars (with basic car knowledge mind you).
Once upon a time they were more common than gasoline cars. But back then, processing crude oil to gasoline was a significant undertaking and importantly, there's a lot of parts to precisely machine for the early 1900's, an electric motor and crude control mechanism were super cheap to make. Hell, the diesel even came about because let's go and run engines on something a bit easier to obtain than gasoline. And steam cars were also super common again because of obtaining fuel though also have their own practical issues. Journeys of time were typically short distance affairs so the range problems of electric cars back then weren't as big a deal. That and most places had 15mph speed limits or lower so you're hardly trail blazing with one.
Because Electric RC vehicles(cars, trucks, boats, airplaines, helicopters) are much cheaper than ICE vehicles. Unfortunately, EV sells at a higher price than its ICE counterparts because most EVs are luxuries. People buy them to show off their "eco-friendly" ideologies. --- Post updated --- More specifically, EVs are popular because of the advancement of solid-state power electronics technologies. Back then, adjusting motor speed was accomplished by huge and inefficient inductors and resistors. Now we do the same things using switched-mode power supplies(SMPS)
Do you know what a SMPS is actually made of? Guessing with the statement that inductors are inefficient, no. Probably unaware of what an inductor is too as they were utterly useless for that purpose And bigger change, albeit only a change that's been possible since the advancement of switching technology, brushless motors. The traditional early 1900s EV at 100% throttle wasn't wasting heat in massive resistor packs (though a lot of 1900s EVs actually used a different more efficient technique even back then), still didn't have the efficiency of a modern EV, purely from having crude brushed motors. Brushless is far far more efficient, and higher peak output too. But no, many of the early EVs had a better way of doing throttle than using a massive variable resistor or switching across banks of fixed resistors. Have multiple windings in the motor itself and switch them on and off in stages. Worked quite well. There were also other setups where you'd have no throttle but would manually pulse the motor on and off instead taking advantage of the fact that the motors of the day would hardly be slamming you in your seat.
You misinterpreted it. What I said is back then they were using inefficient inductiors, I didn't mean that inductors are still inefficient today. Back in the days, they connect the inductor in series to the motor, to convert the active power to reactive power, which is inefficient. Now SMPS use inductor to smoothen the current spikes caused by switching, which is efficient. --- Post updated --- Electric cars have existed before ICE cars
They didn't use an inductor at all, the motor itself is an inductive load. The inductor in a SMPS is not for smoothing current spikes, it *causes* the current spikes. Inductor design hasn't changed in over a century. They simply weren't used as part of the control system of a traditional EV. Look up how buck and boost regulation works, both rely on an inductors tendancy to resist changes in current flowing through them, much the same as a capacitor resists changes in voltage across them. Sure, you can use them as a filtering component, but that actually isn't the intention in an SMPS (equally a SMPS may include one as part of an output filter, but again, that won't be part of the primary SMPS operation)
